I started out 2014 thinking “do all the things!”. I set myself up with the task of reading as many books as I could manage – even making them a theme for blog posts. I set aside time for fiction writing, and for reading books written by writers on technical aspects of writing. I wanted…

You know you have reader’s block when everything else in the world is much more interesting than continuing to read that book. To be fair, I have tried. “Just read a few pages”, I say to myself, and I do but….

When I decided to sample some recent, successful, YA fiction books, The Fault in Our Stars (TFiOS) was at the top of the list. I’d seen some images from the film, so I knew the book was about sick teenager, and I’d seen people wailing about how heart breaking the book was. It has that…

Okay, so August was supposed to be the month where I read four books – after all, I had two whole weeks off, so why not? First, I had two really busy weeks at work, which involved loads of writing and trying to do everything I needed to get done before my time off. I…

Okay, here is where I admit to being the typical heathen fangirl. Until Monday, my only experience of the theatre was childhood panto trips and a dance/musical play put on by a friend. Yes, I booked tickets to see Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’, purely because of the lead actor – Richard Armitage. Uncouth fangirling There’s…

So, I spent July not finishing A Game of Thrones, and reading four apocalypse books. I’ve done around 15k of creative writing for work, and God knows how much not very creative writing for work. I even managed to make progress on editing the book. I’m picking up the reading challenge again this month –…

AKA, what I read while avoiding finishing A Game of Thrones. * Warning: here there be spoilers * I’m having issues with Game of Thrones. It has tonnes of characters. Many of them are asshats (that may be my favourite American word). Bad stuff never stops happening to the nice people and pets get…

It turns out, I don’t. I thought I did. When people are asked, “what do you do to relax”, they often say things like: read a book, watch TV, surf the interwebs. I don’t know, maybe super laid-back people find most things relaxing. But analytical, project creators like me tend to turn relaxing hobbies into…

The big thing that last month taught me is that I shouldn’t forget what reading is about. Reading fiction is something we do to feed the imagination, and relax. It’s not supposed to be a chore, or a competition in speed reading. It’s hard not to feel that way when you’re reading a book you…